The Kimberley certification process for diamonds has been entirely co-opted and no longer serves the purpose of ensuring you are not buying blood diamonds. All the NGOs that matter have already walked away considering it a lost cause.
If you buy natural diamonds, there is a good chance you are supporting criminal enterprise and warlords.
You’re getting ripped off, too. The price is artificially inflated, because it’s controlled by a cartel.
You spelled Diamond Mafia wrong.
But if you don’t buy her a real blood diamond how will she know that you love her enough to support slave labor?
I have prime.
DeBeers have massive investments in the synthetic diamond industry. They are actually world leaders and have known that it’s possible to produce higher quality diamonds at a much lower cost. They make a killing selling synthetic diamonds to industry.
If your significant other would be upset with a brass ring for an engagement ring, I don’t pity the misery that will be both of your lives.
I like brass for jewelry, but it gets green and grimey.
Depends if it turned her finger green or not.
Yeah brass wouldn’t work as brass polishing sucks. I’ve had to spend hours every year polishing the brass pots at my grandparents place. Never again.
What happens if the pots were unpolished? Does it effect aesthetics or function?
Yeah it’s (as far as I know) just aesthetic since the pots were decorative from the 1800s. I don’t think anyone cares about the aesthetics of like brass pipe fittings but for something decorative (like the pots and a wedding ring) the aesthetics matter.
A nice patina.
Honestly, fuck diamonds in general. Normalize jewelry with unnatural laboratory gems. The old gems are boring, bring on the synthetic glowy gems.
Edit: damn, you can get chunks of reject sapphire made for F35 fighter jet windows on their new store. They’ve got some pieces over 1kg.
Diamonds are great…
…as tools in the hands of the working class.
Those look interesting
They are so fucking cool. If I had the money, I’d have a room that’s just these gems+blacklights. There are some that change color based on the wavelength of UV light they’re exposed to. Some glow a different color under UV than they do under normal light. Some are both fluorescent and phosphorescent, meaning they light up in response to UV, but then they can maintain their glow temporarily. Some change color based on the angle you view them at. They’re so fucking cool.
Holy shit I need blacklight jewelry! I got lab alexandrite and lab moissanite for my wedding ring, but I didn’t know I could get SCIENCE gems! And I do a ton of confocal microscopy where we use dichroic for splitting the wavelengths! Thank you for this link, I’m def buying all my jewelry from here from now on!
My wedding ring was 30 dollars on Etsy. It has just as much meaning as a 10k diamond to me.
Mine was literally a piece of stainless Steel my mate turned into a ring. Even made me spares, love them.
Stainless Steel is the alloy of miracles. Fuck the naturally occurring rock, I want the alloy millions would fight to the death over for most of human history.
I got my wife her dream ring with synthetic stones. Her idea.
She’s a keeper. Screw these dumb traditions engineered to indebt.
I am interested in purchasing a glow in the dark wedding ring
The mechanics of extracting diamonds is baffling. Hell, even gold. Cutoff grades (where it is no longer feasible to mine economically) for gold is about 2.5 grams per tonne of overburden… that’s a fucking metric shitpile of waste rock, some of which is ML/ARD (Metal leaching or acid generating).
I find the whole thing fascinating, and mining can be done responsibly, but it is not an easy thing in general
we can achive what the earth can in a matter of months or we can chuck kids in a pit …humanity chose
Wait, wait, go back a second. Are the child death pits still an option? Can we retroactively volunteer ourselves?
They look tacky as shit regardless of whether they are mined, synthesized or fake.
I disagree. Shit does not look tacky. Ok, it is tacky, probably, but in different sense.
Technically man-made diamonds are also the diamond industry.
Which is fine because the intent is not the same as DeBeers pigs.
Please Gen Z, finish killing this Industry off.
Trust us we are. It’s not like we can afford them anyway
And even if we could, why buy some stone to wear if one could buy 10l gas for the same price?
Look up moissanite. It’s literally the cheaper, superior diamond. The fact that it exists just goes to show how inflated the diamond market is
Moissanite is chemically different to diamond (SiC vs C), has a different crystal structure, and is less hard. You can also get actual lab-grown diamond, but they are quite expensive. But you probabaly won’t be able to tell the difference anyway.
But also, who cares that it’s less hard? I’m not using it for a drill bit, it’s a cosmetic piece. Literally it’s only function is visual. And moissanite is superior. All the visual markers that are used for beauty in a diamond it surpasses. And some quick googling I did to confirm that also showed me that diamond is only barely harder (“With a hardness of 9.25, moissanite is the second-hardest material used a gemstone.” a diamond is a 10.) and it turns out, less likely to break in some cases. “Moissanite doesn’t have a cleavage plane, while diamond does. (This is an internal plane along which a diamond crystal can easily split)” So if you hit a diamond in the wrong spot, it can still crack. Moissanite does not have a weak spot.
It’s very important to me that my gemstone only has carbon. If it has silicon I’m going to get very upset. Silicon interferes with your inner flow and can have harmful ions.
- my crystal wearing, hippy Grandma.
Usually you can tell the difference. Lab grown diamond is pure while rock grown diamond is imperfect.
But you have to look at it under a magnifying glass to tell, and know what you’re looking for.
It’s like 93% as hard but has better better optical properties which is what matters.
A strategy that has been working well for me is “Never buy jewelry of any kind ever because it’s completely pointless.”
Don’t hang around people who demand you consume in order to get their approval. They are empty people who will not support you.
Saw a story about a wedding ring where instead of a diamond the ring was jeweled with the couple’s birth stones fit together into the shape of a heart, which honestly I think is WAY better and probably WAY cheaper too.
What are birth stones?
There’s some religious history to them, but in general these days people are talking about the list of stones that American jewelers came up with in the early 20th century to try to sell more shit.
Birthstones are like the zodiac signs of geology. Each month gets assigned a gemstone.
One of which is diamond, annoyingly enough.
As long as one the birth months isn’t April.
Blood diamonds “the suffering makes them special!”
“It builds character”
But it’s the dried up blood from the child slaves that dug them that make diamonds so pretty!
My nightmare of a previous boss called my moissanite engagement ring “cheap” and “trashy,” and treated us to a 30-minute speech about how if it’s not “real” diamond, it doesn’t count.
I hope sucking down those Marlboro blacks takes care of that problem of a woman sooner, rather than later, and in the meantime the gorgeous rainbow sparkle of my pretty ring is made all the more beautiful for the complete lack of child slavery that went into making it!
… I also just realized that horrible harridan didn’t have an engagement ring, or even a boyfriend, and now some things make sense.
Average employer. I bet they only see diamonds as legitimate because of the slave labour put into them.
Moissanite is a perfect replacement of a diamond. Definitely agree that it looks great, better off putting the money towards something that will actually enhance your life.
It’s got a higher refractory index than diamonds.
We all have these people in our jobs, don’t we? I‘m practicing to engage them with a therapist rn. Have been through abuse when I was young and they love to dump on me. My new goal is to pin a notice on my wall that I get for telling the next bully where to stick it (in public). Lets see how that goes.
“I consider this harassment inappropriate for a workplace. I’d rather not get HR involved.”
Key words from the employee manual or even better, HR training. No emotion, just stating facts. Don’t trust HR, but management knows that more than anyone. They use it as a bludgeon against employees all the time, they know it could be turned against them just as easily.
Good advice! Thank you :)
I would have just sat there quietly and when she finished answered her with “well, that’s your opinion”
I don’t care if I depend on my job and my boss is a POS, my self worth is more valuable than any job.
I usually take a month off of work in the fall each year. One of my bucket list items is taking that time off to find a job with the worst bosses and seeing how far I can go while giving no fucks.
This sounds really fun
Opals are the superior stone and they actually look awsome. Transparent glass like stones are so boring. They are also much cheaper and not harvested with child labor.
Moissanite
Dont opals lose their shine or something over time due to being hydrophilic?
Jade gang
My wife’s is made of a purple sapphire as the main stone with a small diamond on each side. She loves the purple. The diamonds I didn’t pay for, they were her grandmother’s that I got from her sister.
Opals are soft as hell. Not really a diamond replacement.
Why does harness matter? You are supposed to wear them, not cut or drill with them.
An engagement ring is worn on your hand pretty much all the time. Opals are easily damaged, diamonds are exceptionally durable.
Hardness absolutely matters in rings. Not as much in pendants or earrings, but people don’t realize how rough they are with their hands. Most people do not take their rings off to wash their hands, or do their laundry, or, or, or. So many things have unexpected abrasives that may just feel a little rough on your skin, but can significantly damage a soft stone like opal. In a rush and accidentally bang your hand against the door frame? Chipped opal. Back of your hand itches, so you rub it against your jeans briefly? Scratched opal. They’re very fragile stones.
I’m not talking about replacing your diamond drill bit with opal. I mean jewellery
Rings, like engagement/wedding rings, can take quite a beating. You need a hard stone or it won’t really last very long.
I have a lab Ruby in my engagement ring and then lab diamonds around it. The lab Ruby is a good alternative because it’s a hard stone! Sapphires and alexandrite are also just as hard and could be good stones in a ring you’d wear everyday.
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My engagement ring used sapphire. Beautiful stone.
It’s more dropping or getting scratched, but I’ll admit I’ve never seen opal break.
Hematite. The most metal gemstone.
